A new version of the popular virtualization software - VirtualBox - has been released. The new release, VirtualBox 4.0.8, addresses a very important thing missing from the earlier release. With this release GNOME Shell finally works inside VirtualBox.

With support for Unity being introduced in the last release, the GNOME Shell support in this release is indeed a very important feature.

Install VirtualBox 4.0.8 in Ubuntu 11.04

VirtualBox 4.0.8 is not available in the main Ubuntu repository. So to install it you have to add the VirtualBox repository first. To do it, open the Terminal and open the file /etc/apt/sources.list.

$ sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Now, add the line given below in the file. Then save and close it.

deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian natty contrib

After the VirtualBox repository has been added, register the Oracle public key with the command